Posts Tagged ‘time’

A month ago I told you in my blog post that I would be attending the 40th class reunion of the students who were my first French 2 class the year I began teaching high school in 1973. They were the class of '75. It was a bit strange to see "my kids" as 58 year olds! It was such a nice evening and all part of a weekend on steroids.

I was able to ride up to Detroit and back with one of the members of the class and his son. We left at 6:00 Friday morning and arrived in time to change clothes and get to the graduation ceremony of the 2015 class of the school where I taught my first 11 years out of college, Inter-City Baptist High School. It was a special blessing to see that the school is continuing on in fulfilling the same mission it had when I taught there over 30 years ago.

After graduation everyone was invited to a reception in the school gym. I saw people from literally every decade of my adult life — former students from my years there and from my years of teaching at BJU, former colleagues (one of whom had a grandson graduating that night!), parents of former students, old friends from Detroit and from Greenville. I had a great time talking to many people, sharing remembrances, and learning what's been going on in many lives. It was a super-encouraging time! My daughter Megan picked me up afterwards to take me to their house.

Saturday morning I enjoyed time with our grandkids Drew and Maddie. We all enjoyed a breakfast of donuts from Dutch Girls. If any of you live in the Detroit area and haven't tried Dutch Girls donuts, you need to!

Saturday late morning I drove down to Ohio to visit my mother in the nursing home. Poor Mom is in month 19 of hospice. It was such a nice visit! My sister came to spend the time with us also, and we all swapped stories from the past. It was great to see Mom smiling, laughing, and taking part in the story telling. I never know when my visit with her will be the last, and so I was especially glad that this one was so pleasant.

I drove back to Detroit and arrived just in time for the class reunion. It was great to be able to talk at least a short time with each of the 18 class members who came to the reunion. The one who came the farthest to attend is now living in Denver. The stories flowed like water before, during, and after the delicious meal. Before we all went for a tour to see what the school looks like now, pictures were taken of all the class members present. Here's a particularly nice one.

I was the only one of their former teachers who was able to attend, and I have to say that I was treated like royalty. They wanted me to get into their group picture, but I told them the spouses should take pictures of just the classmates first. When I went to join them, I was going to slip in at the end of a row. They insisted that I be front and center. Since the shorter people were in the front, I got down on one knee and hammed it up.Click here to continue reading this post ⇒

Wednesday of this week is the final Bodacious Bonza Bottler Day (BBBD) of our lifetime. Bonza Bottler Day is when the number of the month and the day of the month are the same — for instance January 1 (1-1), February 2 (2-2), and so on. February 2, Groundhog Day in the USA, gives the monthly holiday its mascot and logo. If you want to know more about the history and purpose of the holiday, you can read more on the official website. A Bodacious Bonza Bottler Day is when the number of the month, day, and year are the same.

When I last posted about BBBD on 10-10-10, I mentioned that December 12, 2012, would be the final BBBD of this century. The reason this is the final BBBD for us is that there are only 12 months in a year. If we had a thirteenth month, maybe named Oncember, we could have another BBBD next year on 13-13-13, but alas....

I hope, when you saw the title of my blog post, you weren't thinking that I am buying into the prediction of a cataclysm on the final day — December 21, 2012 — on the Mayan Calendar. If you're not familiar with all that, there's an article about it on Wikipedia.

A friend on Facebook asked her friends if any of us actually believe the world is going to end on Dec. 21 because the Mayan calendar doesn't go any further. I commented something to the effect that if the Father hasn't told the Son, I doubt that He shared that information with the Mayans!

I like several cartoonists' thoughts and explanations of the whole matter.

Frank and Ernest have their own punny take on it.

This next cartoon is great, in light of the cataclysmic "fiscal cliff" we keep hearing about.

Here's my favorite:

I hope this gave you a much needed laugh, and maybe even a reason for at least a small celebration on 12-12-12. A lifelong friend is celebrating his last birthday in his 50's on today. Hope it's a nice day for you, Scott, and if the the Mayan Calendar is wrong, you'll get to celebrate your big 6-0 a year from. 🙂

We are in final exams here at BJU. I have lots more to do before this semester becomes history for me, and I'm looking forward to the change of pace that our Christmas break will bring.

quotation...

"I have held many things in my hands, and I have lost them all; but whatever I have placed in God's hands, that I still possess." — Martin Luther

=^..^=
Rob

If God wanted me to touch my toes, He would have put them on my knees.

It seems that Daylight Saving Time (DST) is one of those things that people either love or hate. While I enjoy being able to do more in the evening because we have an "extra hour" of daylight, I remember living in Michigan and having daughters who protested at having to go to bed while it was still light outside. We couldn't convince them that it was night. Monday of this week, I had two very different, personal reactions to DST. When my alarm went off at my usual 5:30 rising time, it still felt as if I were getting up at 4:30, and kinda like I had been hit by a truck. But then it was nice to be able to take a walk in the evening while it was still light out, which is something I haven't been able to do in a while. I decided to look into the history of DST, of which I post a synopsis below.

It is often said that Benjamin Franklin came up with the idea of Daylight Saving Time, but from what I could find, that is not necessarily the case. While living in Paris, Ben Franklin woke up earlier than usual one day and was struck by how many hours of daylight were being wasted to sleep during the summer months. He published an anonymous letter to the Journal de Paris in which he suggested satirically that Parisians could economize on candles by rising earlier to use morning sunlight. He did not specifically mention moving the clocks ahead. With tongue firmly planted in cheek, he suggested ways to enforce (rationing the sale of candlewax and levying window shutter taxes) and to encourage (ringing church bells or firing cannons at sunrise) such economies.

Our much-loved/much-hated method of advancing the time by one hour in the spring and rolling it back an hour in the fall is credited at least partially to George Vernon Hudson, an entomologist from New Zealand. Because of his love for collecting insects, he greatly valued daylight in the evening, during after work hours. His initial proposal in 1895 was that his country adjust the time by two hours! In England a builder (also an avid golfer) named William Willett, also proposed a form of DST to give people more time before dusk for playing golf. He came up with this idea independently from Hudson.Click here to continue reading this post ⇒

This next weekend is on my extremely short list of my least favorite weekends of the year. Why? We will be switching to Daylight Savings Time. It seems as though losing an hour happens when I'm tired enough already. Oh well, we'll get that hour back in November, right? 🙂 I'm going to confess something to you in this public forum and I beg you not to turn me in to the authorities — I do not get up in the middle of the night to change my clocks. (Gasp!) For a day or two afterwards, I keep finding clocks that I didn't think of on various appliances, etc. I basically loathe the whole process.

Time has been on my mind lately already as I try to grasp the reality that our grandson Drew is turning four this Wednesday. My long-time readers will probably find that as hard to believe as we do! It doesn't seem like four years since he was born six and a half weeks early. Our second grandchild is due in about a month, and at least for Grandma and Poppie, the time has just flown since we first heard the news. (Although it may not have seemed that way for Mark and Katie, especially for Katie....) The same is true of how fast Nora and Topher's wedding is coming up — in less than four weeks!

Today's blog post is a mixture of cartoons and jokes about time,.

Many people have a fairly fluid sense of time, as seen in the following chat exchange.

New Year's Day is time of reflection and of planning. We look back on the previous year and evaluate, and we look ahead to the new year and prognosticate. 2009 has certainly been a year to remember, or one you wish you could forget, depending on your viewpoint. I don't know of a year in my life when I've seen more of the unforeseen. Dave Barry has a great article about 2009 in review.

One way to see what was on people's minds in 2009 is to view what they looked up on search engines like Google or on online dictionaries. Based on online lookups, here is the Top Ten List of word definitions of the year 2009 at the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. The words in this list give some insights into the year's events.

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a little about me…

My name is Rob Loach and I welcome you to my blog. People come here for an "instant vacation." You can learn more about me and about my instant vacations, including why my blog is called "ivman's blague," by visiting the about page, where you can watch my TV interview about my blog. My site is thirteen years old, so check out the tabs at the top of this page, subjects of interest to you in the tag cloud (below), and older blog posts (about 750 of them) not on the home page of the blog. Though I am posting less often than at first, there's still lots of archived humor here for you to enjoy!

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